“No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.”
— William Blake
I first met Philip Fox when I became a weekly driver for Woodstock Meals on Wheels. One of the ladies who prepares the meals told me to be ready for this elderly gentleman to engage me fully, and also to offer his views on religion.
I liked Mr. Fox at once. He was friendly, and did talk freely, pretty much from the beginning of our interactions about his love of Jesus. He told me how he came to paint the religious imagery that I saw right after he invited me in.
He had taken up painting evocative oil paintings of Kingston’s locomotive trains and the Hudson Valley train stations of his boyhood which he showed me in a corner of his living room. His work reminded me of the surrealist Rene Magritte’s depictions of trains, especially a famous one of a steaming locomotive emerging inexplicably from a fireplace. Mr. Fox’s trains were painted as they sat motionless in their stations.
Once Mr. Fox lost his beloved wife of over 50 years, he was living alone in his house and studio, now a lawyer’s office on Route 212 just east of the Woodstock town line. He experienced what he described as “a direction” from God henceforth to paint only religious and especially apocalyptic images.
That’s what also happened to the visionary English poet, painter and printmaker William Blake, though Blake’s wife remained his soulmate, and very much alive, throughout his visionary career.
Philip Fox’s work is very moving. One does not have to be of a Christian denomination to see the strange beauty and otherworldly charm of many of his envisioned works. There is a painting that will make you think of Quaker minister Edward Hicks’ “Peaceable Kingdom”; in Fox’s version, the lion and the lamb share center stage with Jesus. There is The Garden of Eden as Fox illuminates it, and also a blood-red painting of the crucified Christ which is terrifyingly powerful.
Philip Fox believes that we are now living through the last period which the Christian bible, or more specifically the Apocrypha, delineates as The Rapture. He told me that since I am Jewish I should rejoice as I will certainly be among a certain number of latter-day survivors who will be there to greet the dawn of a Christian new age, one of peace and good will towards all.
He does not expect every listener — or maybe any — to agree, but his depictions of The Endtime are extremely vivid.
Philip Fox was probably the most interesting and the most unusual, neighbor I could have ever found out about. At 93, he should be honored and cherished as a true Woodstock original.
If you would like to see a small group of his Christian-themed paintings, visit the basement of the Dutch Reformed Church next to Woodstock’s village green.
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